Implementation of a virtuous incubation system utilizing IoT technology

Abstract

The Virtuous Incubation System is a solution aimed at transforming poultry farming by integrating Internet of Things (IoT) technology into the incubation process. This paper seeks to improve the efficiency and success rate of poultry egg incubation while minimizing manual intervention, reducing resource consumption, and ensuring optimal conditions for embryo development by providing a smart incubator system. The smart incubator addresses the challenges of traditional manual monitoring and adjustments by leveraging IoT devices, sensors, and data analytics to create an automated and intelligent incubation system. It provides energy efficiency by incorporating energy-efficient components to minimize power consumption, thereby reducing operational costs for farmers, and by providing notifications and alerts where critical deviations in environmental conditions or equipment malfunction, enabling proactive intervention to prevent losses. A cross-section of small- to medium-scale poultry producers, particularly those engaged in hatching chicks, were interviewed to highlight the main challenges regarding the business of hatching chicks. It was learned through the interviews that chick production on a small to medium scale was relatively expensive due to the labor employed to monitor the production and losses due to adverse conditions resulting in a poor success rate in hatching the chicks. Thus, the implementation of the virtuous incubation system comes in to solve the main challenges being faced by the local poultry producers.